Egypt (La Mort de Philae) eBook

Crumbling and dust. . . . Far around, on every
side of these palaces and temples of the central artery—­which
are the best preserved and remain proudly upright—­stretch
great mournful spaces, on which the sun from morning
till evening pours an implacable light. There,
amongst the lank desert plants, lie blocks scattered
at hazard—­the remains of sanctuaries, of
which neither the plan nor the form will ever be discovered.
But on these stones, fragments of the history of the
world are still to be read in clear-cut hieroglyphs.

To the west of the hypostyle hall there is a region
strewn with discs, all equal and all alike. It
might be a draught-board for Titans with draughts
that would measure ten yards in circumference.
They are the scattered fragments, slices, as it were,
of a colonnade of the Ramses. Farther on the
ground seems to have passed through fire. You
walk over blackish scoriae encrusted with brazen bolts
and particles of melted glass. It is the quarter
burnt by the soldiers of Cambyses. They were
great destroyers of the queen city, were these same
Persian soldiers. To break up the obelisks and
the colossal statues they conceived the plan of scorching
them by lighting bonfires around them, and then, when
they saw them burning hot, they deluged them with cold
water. And the granites cracked from top to base.

It is well known, of course, that Thebes used to extend
for a considerable distance both on this, the right,
bank of the Nile, where the Pharaohs resided, and
opposite, on the Libyan bank, given over to the preparers
of mummies and to the mortuary temples. But to-day,
except for the great palaces of the centre, it is
little more than a litter of ruins, and the long avenues,
lined with endless rows of sphinxes or rams, are lost,
goodness knows where, buried beneath the sand.

At wide intervals, however, in the midst of these
cemeteries of things, a temple here and there remains
upright, preserving still its sanctified gloom beneath
its cavernous carapace. One, where certain celebrated
oracles used to be delivered, is even more prisonlike
and sepulchral than the others in its eternal shadow.
High up in a wall the black hole of a kind of grotto
opens, to which a secret corridor coming from the
depths used to lead. It was there that the face
of the priest charged with the announcement of the
sibylline words appeared—­and the ceiling
of his niche is all covered still with the smoke from
the flame of his lamp, which was extinguished more
than two thousand years ago!

*****

What a number of ruins, scarcely emerging from the
sand of the desert, are hereabout! And in the
old dried-up soil, how many strange treasures remain
hidden! When the sun lights thus the forlorn distances,
when you perceive stretching away to the horizon these
fields of death, you realise better what kind of a
place this Thebes once was. Rebuilt as it were
in the imagination it appears excessive, superabundant
and multiple, like those flowers of the antediluvian
world which the fossils reveal to us. Compared
with it how our modern towns are dwarfed, and our
hasty little palaces, our stuccoes and old iron!